Talk: The Henry Rollins Show

Mr. Rollins:
 
On November 21st at 10:30 p.m. EST I eagerly tuned into Henry Rollins: Northern Ireland Uncut.
 
I have always been surprised at how uninformed many North Americans are about the world outside the United States and I had looked forward to the shedding of some light on the complex history of Ireland un-united, a fact, by the way, that was largely overlooked on the show.  
 
Your heart, no doubt, was in the right place, Mr. Rollins. You were well-intentioned, to be sure, but the premise of your show that there are parallels between the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the British occupation of Northern Ireland is a stretch indeed. While I recognize that in some early news coverage of the U.S. occupation of Iraq there were American journalists who drew this conclusion, any accurate study of history would reveal that the occupation of Iraq and Northern Ireland have little in common.
 
Your program makes reference to “The Troubles” and forty years of occupation, neglecting to mention the nearly 840 years of Irish resistance to British rule in Ireland, which is presently confined to the six counties now known as Northern Ireland, but that for most of the occupation encompassed all of Ireland, North and South.
 
The statelet you visited was carved out of Ireland by the British, and gerrymandered into existence in 1921. Your comparison of Northern Ireland to present day Iraq overlooked Northern Ireland’s serious problems, which remained unaired to the viewing audience.
 
You did interview insightful commentators such as Anthony McIntyre and Eamon McCann but they were hamstrung by the Iraq premise. How could they expound on the unique aspects of their conflict, an 840 year-old struggle against British colonial occupation when you framed your interviews within present day Iraq--a victim of a preemptive war started by the United States on the pretext of regime change?

You went to extraordinary lengths to make the very strained comparison to Iraq, but like most Americans you did not look in your own backyard. Puerto Rico, a Latin American island-nation in the Caribbean, is the second oldest colony in the world—second only to the British colony called Northern Ireland—and it is the only accurate comparison to the continued imperialist endeavors of Britain and the United States.
 
Puerto Rico was invaded by the United States in 1898. The island is an unincorporated territory of the United States whose people were used for scientific experimentation, whose children are used for U.S. wars, but whose residents cannot even vote for the President of the United States. Puerto Rico like Northern Ireland has its own brand of unionists--interestingly Protestant in majority--that want the island to become the 51st state.
 
One of Latin America’s greatest revolutionary leaders who prefigured Che Guevara, the Puerto Rican Pedro Albizu Campos, drew infinite inspiration from Ireland's Easter Rising of 1916 and while a student in the United States worked arduously to have Ireland recognized as a sovereign republic. In fact, Albizu Campos and other Puerto Rican Nationalists/Republicans applied the lessons learned from their Irish comrades to their efforts to rid the island of U.S. rule. Neither country, however, has succeeded in removing foreign forces from their soil, yet.
 
I am disappointed your show contributed little to balance the disinformation, misinformation and plain lack of information that keep Americans ignorant about Northern Ireland and Ireland in general. It is the reason I publish books on these subjects to fill in the blanks that the powerful keep empty.

Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States. Northern Ireland and Puerto Rico are the only such anachronisms left in the modern world. Both countries are on a journey to an uncertain future. Only two outcomes can address the longstanding injustices in both: reunifying Northern Ireland with the rest of Ireland, and recovering Puerto Rico's inalienable right to sovereignty, independence and its own political destiny.  

Sincerely,
Aoife Rivera Serrano